infidel, if, to be a Christian, he must believe a doctrine so horrible as that of infant damnation? Yet this doctrine is seen to be the legitimate offspring of others, still held in tolerably good repute among many, such as the doctrines of election, reprobation, and the imputation of Adam's sin. Do you say it is a most unreasonable doctrine? True: but that is no objection to it in the minds of those who discard reason, and deprecate the exercise of it in matters of religious faith. Neither is the fact that the doctrine is monstrous, unjust and cruel, any objection to it in the minds of those, who have persuaded themselves that the divine and human ideas of justice and mercy have nothing in common; or that an act may be right and just in God, which would be wicked and abominable in man.
But there is cause for joy and thankfulness that this doctrine has been compelled to retreat before the dawning light of the New Age—compelled to hide its head "in the holes of the rocks, and in the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of His majesty." For the light of the New Jerusalem, which is a glorious light from the Lord out of heaven—a light breaking forth from the spiritual or heavenly sense of the Sacred Scripture—is now shed abroad with greater or less effulgence in the minds of multitudes, who have never heard of Swedenborg or the church of the New Jerusalem by name. And one of the immediate effects of this universally diffused light, is, to put to silence, or drive into obscurity, doctrines, whose hideous deformity it so faithfully reveals.
